With Tilly, Tilburg University now also has its own chatbot

A chatbot that answers questions about your courses and lets you practice for exams? Tilly, the smart chatbot from Tilburg University, can do it all. “It’s like talking to your own professor,” says Matthijs van Gils, project manager of Tilburg.ai.

“We are reinventing science under the influence of new digital technologies. We are preparing our students for a radically new way of working.” With these words, rector magnificus Wim van de Donk introduced the new chatbot Tilly during the opening of the academic year.

Tilly is primarily intended for students, but the platform mainly puts lecturers to work. The chatbot does not learn automatically: the knowledge comes from what lecturers upload themselves. They can create their own chatbot and fill it with course materials such as syllabi and slides. Students can then interact with this chatbot to review lecture material or practice for exams.

“Tilly is a chatbot platform. Staff members have the opportunity to create their own chatbots,” explains Matthijs van Gils, project manager of Tilburg.ai. The result can be a comprehensive chatbot that knows all the content of a course. But the HR department, for instance, could also use the chatbot to navigate collective labor agreements.

Educational context

While artificial intelligence was initially used mainly by students, the university is now taking more initiative itself. The use of Tilly falls under the university’s existing AI index, which outlines what you can and cannot do with AI in assignments and exams.

The chatbot helps students with their courses and staff with their work, but they must still think for themselves. Just like ChatGPT, Tilly can make mistakes. Van Gils points out that students should not simply ‘copy and paste’ everything from the chatbot. Tilly remains a supportive tool.

Data

Tilly was developed by Tilburg University’s own developers. Features customized specifically to education can be added over time. Soon, it will be possible to easily generate quizzes or practice exams and share them directly. lecturers will also gain access to a dashboard with usage statistics, so they can see how often their chatbot is used by students.

The chatbot runs on a Large Language Model via Microsoft Azure, hosted in European data centers. Only the necessary fragments of questions are sent to the model and deleted immediately after being answered. According to Van Gils, this makes Tilly a safe alternative, ensuring that students’ personal data does not end up with large commercial parties such as OpenAI.

National collaboration

More experiments with artificial intelligence are taking place in higher education. The University of Amsterdam launched UvA AI Chat earlier this year, and SURF is working on EduGenAI, a nationally deployable AI system for higher education. Van Gils is not worried about competition: “I think we will ultimately work together toward a version that can function well for all universities, universities of applied sciences, and vocational schools.”